Deadlands: A tale of woe...

[gleichman]

...but not really a tale of campaign failure, not yet anyway. I thought
I'd toss it out for discussion.

A while back we kicked off a Deadlands - The Weird West campaign. The
concept was cool, who wouldn't jump at a chance to do cowboys vs.
zombies? My wife would actually run the campaign, but before I handed
it over to her I went through the rule books to find those things that
would wreck it before it had begun.

There were a number.

I was surprised to see that firearms in Deadlands resembled more the
toy cap guns of my youth than the weapons of The West. Or rather, I
would have been surprised if that wasn't the default standard of rpg
design. Easy enough to fix, I dropped the Size of everything in the
game by 1 and raised the damage of weapons in general. The latter
increases allowed me to show the differences between weapons better.

Going over the combat rules I had to toss in a number of other changes
here and there- adding passive range defense, removing cumulative
damage and cutting down the death spiral, fixing Vamoosin' such that
it worked, adjusting the stun, unconsciousness and wound levels so that
they produced the expected result of Wild West style combat.

Deadlands dice mechanics shares the "modifier which isn't a
modifier" hole with old time Shadowrun and that had to be patched.
Explosions were small nukes that raged across the board, I patched it.

The setting background was complete stupidity, showing neither respect
for the actual historic period or for the genre. Crippled by PC feeling
and wishful thinking (why do so many games have The South rise again,
or never fall), it had to go. In its place was the historical west
timeline with a Hollywood favor and a dark undercurrent of a seldom
seen mystical invasion.

And so on. It didn't take a lot of work, and at the end of it I had a
game that was still very much Deadlands with many of its worse features
either improved or removed. It still used a silly dice mechanic and
there were problems- but I hoped they'd be minor. It should have been
good enough for a non-generational campaign.


Except for one part that I didn't look at too closely, perhaps
because deep down I knew it would be a heartbreaker.

The use of poker hands to resolve spell casting is perhaps the single
coolest thing in Deadlands although the poker chips and card based
initiative give it a contest. It was too cool to give up, and on that
basis I didn't examine it closely. Online people sing its praises,
surely it would be good enough for my game...

Sigh.

It took about a half dozen games, but the huckster players started
complaining. Serious complaining. I hadn't been watching them too
closely but I did agree that they seemed to be feast or famine- either
being worthless or powerful beyond belief.

I finally agreed to look in the poker mechanic in detail. Some
searching turned up the hand probabilities. Cross-referencing with the
dice probabilities revealed the nature of the system plainly.

Feast and famine it was, with more the later than the former. Poker
hands have huge breaks in odds as one goes up the ranking, and the game
system took advantage of this by the escalating the power of those
hands. To balance this, the chance of backlash is high and the effect
of common hands low. In concept perhaps ok.

In practice, it sucked.

Great success would happen on the least important times, great failures
in the most important times. Rare would be a good pairing of event and
spell result. Consistency was nowhere to be found- and it's
consistency that we most associate with excellence. Instead of a hero
armed with rare mystical knowledge, the Huckster character felt like a
blind clown armed with dynamite.

I could find no way to keep the poker system. Anything I tried to make
it more consistent either required me to re-write all the individual
spell effects or vastly increase the Huckster's power.

With great sadness, I booted the poker hand mechanic for a dice based
approached. I kept the hand names to link to the original rules while
invoking at least a bit of the poker magic.

The campaign had memorable characters and events. But the system fought
it and by the time I moved to replace it, the group's morale had been
damaged too much.

We put the campaign on hold and switched to Shadowrun (using HERO).



We'll likely go back to Deadlands in time. So I don't count it as a
complete failure. It will be interesting to see if my Huckster's
changes actually work, or if they yanked the soul of the game away.

For those interested, all the changes are found at:
http://home.comcast.net/~b.gleichman/Deadlands/

[Mary K. Kuhner]

Post by gleichman
Great success would happen on the least important times, great failures
in the most important times. Rare would be a good pairing of event and
spell result. Consistency was nowhere to be found- and it's
consistency that we most associate with excellence. Instead of a hero
armed with rare mystical knowledge, the Huckster character felt like a
blind clown armed with dynamite.

Nice analysis. I ended up feeling this way about Shadowwrun v1; it
was not really possible to make a competent character, only a beginner
with flashes of brilliance. That works at the start of a campaign,
but stops working later on--a particularly annoying result.

Post by gleichman
The campaign had memorable characters and events. But the system fought
it and by the time I moved to replace it, the group's morale had been
damaged too much.

Can you say more about this--how it manifested, what people tried to
do about it? I'm thinking a lot about player morale and its
cultivation lately.

Mary Kuhner ***@eskimo.com

[Del Rio]

Post by Mary K. Kuhner

Post by gleichman
The campaign had memorable characters and events. But the system fought
it and by the time I moved to replace it, the group's morale had been
damaged too much.

Can you say more about this--how it manifested, what people tried to
do about it? I'm thinking a lot about player morale and its
cultivation lately.

Here's something that I'm still working on...

I proposed that players would vote each other rolepaying
rewards. I.e. everyone, including players and GM would have
some number of points that they could distribute to any player
except themselves. All of these rewards would be in the form
of "Story Points". Story points could be used for the
following sorts of things. (Btw, my campaign is D&D/d20
based, but includes Hero/GURPS style Ads/Disads).

o make a re-roll of a non-stress die roll (1 point)
o make a re-roll of a combat or otherwise very important die
roll (5 points)
o call for the GM to follow up a storyline that you want to
pursue (variable, probably starts at 10, depending on how
large/important the storyline)
o call for the GM to change or drop an existing storyline
(expensive as previous, TBD)
o buy off the effects of diasadvantages temporarily, such as
for a single instance ("relatively" cheap, TBD)
o buy off diadvantages permanently (expensive, TBD)
o buy more advantages (expensive, TBD)

I thought that this would increase player interest and feeling
of involvement in the game. It never got a chance to fly,
though - it was resoundingly shot down. Or, as I would put it,
my innovative and inclusive approach was resoundingly shot down
by my stodgy and conservative player group. ;-)

I may still re-pitch this idea to them at some point, I believe
it has potential.

[Mary K. Kuhner]

Post by Del Rio
I proposed that players would vote each other rolepaying
rewards. I.e. everyone, including players and GM would have
some number of points that they could distribute to any player
except themselves.

[selectively snipped]

Post by Del Rio
o make a re-roll of a combat or otherwise very important die
roll (5 points)
o call for the GM to follow up a storyline that you want to
pursue (variable, probably starts at 10, depending on how
large/important the storyline)
o buy more advantages (expensive, TBD)

I would worry about a "rich get richer" outcome, leading to
more and more bad feelings among the group.

My thinking about RPGs has really been influenced by a post-mortem
report I read, covering the RPGA tournament module "Webs of Deceit".
One point it raised was that the tournament format gave player-
voted awards, and one particular PC *never* got the award no
matter who was playing him. He was (a) a fighter, and (b) described
in his personality sketch as a silent, mysterious, introverted
guy. No one could play this character in a way that attracted
the favorable attention of the other players and GM. Rewarding
"roleplaying" just embittered players stuck with supporting roles
like this one.

Here, I'd worry that the players with initially "successful"
character concepts--characters who sparkled in play and also got
things done--would get the lion's share of story points. Those
characters would then get to pick storylines that favored them,
score stunning successes in critical situations, and buy flashy
advantages. So they would continue to shine, and continue
to get story points--up until the other players started voting based
on resentment rather than admiration. But by then, the mechanism
has done more harm than good.

If anything, it's the PC who is overlooked by the group who needs
tailored plotlines, extra benefits, etc. If the problem is the PC,
the extra perks may give him what he needs to shine. If the problem
is the player, maybe a bit of attention will help there too.

The only time I'd see rewarding popularity as a good thing is if
the group has a habit of playing one way, but a strong desire to
play a different way, and just needs a boost to stick to it.
Otherwise, popularity is its own reward, and I think a mechanical
reward as well is going to be excessive.

Post by Del Rio
I thought that this would increase player interest and feeling
of involvement in the game. It never got a chance to fly,
though - it was resoundingly shot down. Or, as I would put it,
my innovative and inclusive approach was resoundingly shot down
by my stodgy and conservative player group. ;-)
I may still re-pitch this idea to them at some point, I believe
it has potential.

Can you describe clearly what kind of play you are trying to promote?

In the one RPGA event I've played in, the player-voted prize went
to someone who played his mage as really neurotic. It was brilliantly
done in that he had maybe 50-60% of the spotlight time but he was
very good at tossing a bit of it back to the rest of us--giving
us lines to play off and so forth--so it wasn't resented. On the
other hand, it was incredibly distracting. We didn't get far with
the scenario at all. I didn't mind, but in a serious campaign I
would have minded a lot.

I'd have been with your players, I think: bad feelings based
on competitiveness among group members have killed several campaigns
I've been in, and I'd want to avoid stirring them up if I could.
But you know your own group, and I don't.

Mary Kuhner ***@eskimo.com

[gleichman]

Post by Mary K. Kuhner
I would worry about a "rich get richer" outcome, leading to
more and more bad feelings among the group.

Mary beat me to this and I agree with everything she said.

In simple terms, tossing out a scarce resource for players to compete over
is never a good idea IMO. It fosters ill will between the players and doubly
rewards those who likely least need it. You want your players to work
together and be friends, this isn't the way to do.

[Mary K. Kuhner]

Post by gleichman

Post by Mary K. Kuhner
I would worry about a "rich get richer" outcome, leading to
more and more bad feelings among the group.

In simple terms, tossing out a scarce resource for players to compete over
is never a good idea IMO. It fosters ill will between the players and doubly
rewards those who likely least need it. You want your players to work
together and be friends, this isn't the way to do.

One other thing to watch out for:

If a resource can be used for both re-rolls and buying permanent
advantages, you can get some weird pathologies. We saw this in the
_Paradisio_ Shadowrun v1 campaign. The core fighters and decker
*had* to reroll frequently to avoid the death spiral--it was
quickly apparent that if they didn't, they were going to die.
The private investigator and to some extent the mage didn't have to
do this rerolling all the time. After a year-long campaign the
fighters had zero advancement, and the PI had an astonishing amount--
he could have doubled his core skill, or maxed out two or three
stats.

There was only one player involved for all six PCs and this *still*
bred resentment. I hate to think what would have happened with six
players. The fighters felt they were being doubly punished, because
their lives were constantly in danger, and they never got to improve.

Since that game I have made it a practice never to mix advancement
and rerolls. If I have both, I make them totally separate. A character
who doesn't need rerolls can hoard them, but at least he can't raise
his game mechanics through the roof.

It seems almost impossible to make diverse character types equally
reroll-hungry.

Mary Kuhner ***@eskimo.com

[gleichman]

Post by Mary K. Kuhner
If a resource can be used for both re-rolls and buying permanent
advantages, you can get some weird pathologies.

Deadlands sadly also has this problem. And a serious issue with niche
protection. I may have to do something about both next time we attempt it.

[Simon Smith]

Post by gleichman

Post by Mary K. Kuhner
If a resource can be used for both re-rolls and buying permanent
advantages, you can get some weird pathologies.

Deadlands sadly also has this problem.

Add Star Wars Edition II to the list as well. Oh, and DC Heroes. In
EarthDawn, you can spend a relatively small number of XPs to buy Karma
points, which are temporary boosts. Fortunately the cost of buying each
Karma point is low to negligible.

In my bootleg Star Wars game, skill points can be used to buy Force points,
but given average use characters should approximately break even. And I
consider minor fluctuations around the mean to be acceptable. The intention
is to allow players to arrange things so that their characters' Force points
stay more in tune with their character concept. A character with four Force
points who only 'ought' to have one feels odd. And characters with more than
three Force points can really muck up a scenario because they're just too
powerful; so the stingy version of my Force rules ensures that characters
break even somewhere between two and three Force points, which is about the
right power level for my games. Still, it looks like I will need to keep a
close eye on this.

[gleichman]

Post by Simon Smith

Post by gleichman

Post by Mary K. Kuhner
If a resource can be used for both re-rolls and buying permanent
advantages, you can get some weird pathologies.

Deadlands sadly also has this problem.

Add Star Wars Edition II to the list as well. Oh, and DC Heroes.

It was quite "The Thing" during the era of game design. I for one would like
to know what the designers were smoking, I see no real positive benefit of
such a system.

[Simon Smith]

Post by gleichman

Post by Simon Smith

Post by gleichman

Post by Mary K. Kuhner
If a resource can be used for both re-rolls and buying permanent
advantages, you can get some weird pathologies.

Deadlands sadly also has this problem.

Add Star Wars Edition II to the list as well. Oh, and DC Heroes.

It was quite "The Thing" during the era of game design. I for one would like
to know what the designers were smoking, I see no real positive benefit of
such a system.

The intention was to slow down character advancement, especially in the face
of XP awards escalating outside the ranges recommended by the game
designers. The trouble is, with characters spending increasing proportions
of their XPs for short term boosts, there comes ever-greater pressure to
make the XP awards higher still. That gives characters the recommended rate
of advancement (maybe plus a bit more) /plus/ replacements for the XPs spent
on transient bonuses. Rinse, escalate, repeat. And if you have some
character types needing to spend slightly more of their XPs on fudge points,
and some needing to spend fewer, a game can get very skewed indeed.

Simon Smith

[gleichman]

Post by Simon Smith
The intention was to slow down character advancement, especially in the face
of XP awards escalating outside the ranges recommended by the game
designers.

That makes no sense whatsoever.

If advancement is too fast, change the official advancement rewards. If
people who bought the book are exceeding the official advancement awards-
leave them alone, it's their money and their game now. Trying to 'mindgame'
them into behaving with broken mechanics is got to be the stupidest idea
I've heard in a while.

[Rupert Boleyn]

Post by Mary K. Kuhner
If a resource can be used for both re-rolls and buying permanent
advantages, you can get some weird pathologies. We saw this in the
_Paradisio_ Shadowrun v1 campaign. The core fighters and decker
*had* to reroll frequently to avoid the death spiral--it was
quickly apparent that if they didn't, they were going to die.
The private investigator and to some extent the mage didn't have to
do this rerolling all the time. After a year-long campaign the
fighters had zero advancement, and the PI had an astonishing amount--
he could have doubled his core skill, or maxed out two or three
stats.

I believe that the old Marvel Superhero RPG had this system, and if a
clever player could find a way to avoid burning karma for a few sessions
their character would then be in a position to not need to so much, with
obvious consequences. Torg also did this with possibilities, and I found
that this encouraged the mechanically competently players to play very
differently in one-shot games or short campaigns from in longer campaigns.
In the former situations they blew through their possibilities quickly,
there being no reason to keep them, and thus stole the spotlight. In the
latter they'd let other players have the spotlight for the first few
adventures, and spent their possibilities very frugally until they'd got
some serious advancement, and then they'd again steal the spotlight with
their extra-competent characters.

[s***@sonic.net]

Post by Mary K. Kuhner
It seems almost impossible to make diverse character types equally
reroll-hungry.

In principle, I don't see why this *has* to be so;
surely, one can apply spell-failures-wanting-rerolls
to casters, etc...

Figure out the "types", and what their core competencies
are, where they want to rely on succeeding; figure out
a desired re-roll rate, and then figure out what odds
on the dice you need to have, to elicit re-rolls.

In principle ;-|

[gleichman]

Post by s***@sonic.net

Post by Mary K. Kuhner
It seems almost impossible to make diverse character types equally
reroll-hungry.

In principle, I don't see why this *has* to be so;

Same basic reason you can't have a perpetual motion engine.

[Gary Johnson]

Post by Mary K. Kuhner

I proposed that players would vote each other rolepaying rewards.
I.e. everyone, including players and GM would have some number of
points that they could distribute to any player except themselves.

<snip>

Post by Mary K. Kuhner
I would worry about a "rich get richer" outcome, leading to
more and more bad feelings among the group.

I think that's a very good point - when my HERO System group introduced
cards that influenced dice rolls and story developments, we quickly
settled on giving everyone the same number of cards at the start of each
session, regardless of what they had done in the previous session(s). In
our view, it wasn't appropriate to distribute these "adjust the game"
effects on any other basis, particularly peer assessment.

Cheers,

Gary Johnson

[Neil Smith]

Post by Gary Johnson
I think that's a very good point - when my HERO System group introduced
cards that influenced dice rolls and story developments, we quickly
settled on giving everyone the same number of cards at the start of each
session, regardless of what they had done in the previous session(s). In
our view, it wasn't appropriate to distribute these "adjust the game"
effects on any other basis, particularly peer assessment.

PTA shows that this doesn't have to happen (in PTA, Fan Mail carries
over from session to session and is awarded purely on peer assessment).
A few things allow this to happen fairly. First, it's the _players_
that are rewarded, not the characters: failing something audacious is
just as likely to win you Fan Mail as success. Second, the social
contract of the game expects players to throw ideas into a scene, even
if their character isn't there: the point of play is to have cool
conflicts, and it someone else comes up with a better idea than is
already on the table, we should go for it (and they get FM for the idea
too). Finally, Fan Mail is awarded by individuals, not voted on by the
group as a whole.

Neil.

[Gary Johnson]

Post by Neil Smith

Post by Gary Johnson
I think that's a very good point - when my HERO System group
introduced cards that influenced dice rolls and story developments, we
quickly settled on giving everyone the same number of cards at the
start of each session, regardless of what they had done in the
previous session(s). In our view, it wasn't appropriate to distribute
these "adjust the game" effects on any other basis, particularly peer
assessment.

PTA shows that this doesn't have to happen (in PTA, Fan Mail carries
over from session to session

We found that allowing cards to carry over

1. disadvantaged the players who couldn't attend every session (less
opportunity to earn cards)
2. made the game mechanic more intrusive (the cards were a more
obvious resource to manage - players started to think aloud about
whether to use the card now or save it for a later session)

Post by Neil Smith
and is awarded purely on peer assessment).

Players weren't keen on this - they saw it as extra work that ran the risk
of causing inter-player tensions. If we had been using a game system that
built this in as part of the game mechanics, I expect people would have
been okay with it - after all, agreeing to play would have involved
implicit aceptance of it as a part of the social contract.

Cheers,

Gary Johnson

[gleichman]

Post by Gary Johnson
If we had been using a game system that
built this in as part of the game mechanics, I expect people would have
been okay with it - after all, agreeing to play would have involved
implicit aceptance of it as a part of the social contract.

I think there's a lot to this comment.

Normally I hate 'Fate Chip' style mechanics such as those which appear in
Deadlands. However I put that aside for the game because I wanted to play
the game (due to other attractions it offered). I would have never been so
willing if it was an additional mechanic added to the campaign by the GM.

[Del Rio]

Post by Mary K. Kuhner
I would worry about a "rich get richer" outcome, leading to
more and more bad feelings among the group.

Interestingly, the players most likely to "get rich" off of this
scheme are the ones who most vehemently shot it down, while the
players who may have felt the pinch were anywhere from ok with
it to in favor of it.

This could possibly be because the "rich guys" are also the
most game-sophisticated, and perhaps foresaw some of the
problems that you mentioned.

Post by Mary K. Kuhner
Can you describe clearly what kind of play you are trying to promote?

I tend to favor talky, character-interaction heavy, group
oriented stories, told cooperatively through the GM "offering
plot hooks", and the players responding by taking me up on the
ones that interest them, and actively & cooperatively working
to build a story around the characters and situations.

There's no doubt that people take on very different kinds of
roles in the game. I have everything from the "aggressively
elbowing their way to the front" type players to the "haven't
heard from him all night" types. My goal was to encourage the
back-benchers to want to become more actively participatory in
the game by providing a mechanic through which they could
receive a reward other than a pat on the back (which has proved
insufficient motivation in the past) for their efforts.

People may well be right that the worst thing about my idea was
the mixing of a "story/game influencing" and "character
building" mechanic. To the person who compared it with TORG,
good spot. ;-) I'll have to re-think that.

But there are two things that I don't think are a bad idea,
although I may well need a better mechanic for them:

(1) Hero Point style re-roll or fixed bonus

The reason for this is that I dislike the anger/humiliation
caused to players/characters who are under the tyranny of
totally chance-based story telling mechanics. I'm too
simulationist to drop dice altogether, but there are those
times when a character has really put himself forward:
o stepped up to sing a ballad before the King...
o made a soul-bared plea for peace between the warring
tribes...
o roared his battle cry, and raced up the center of the enemy
line to take a mighty swing at their leader...

...and then rolled a 2.

I hate it; the players hate it. I'm thinking about making
people pay the Hero Point in advance, to set forth the notion
that "this is me truly giving it my all", as opposed to being
able to use it retroactively. But *some* variant on the Hero
Point concept will exist in my campaign eventually.

(2) Player feeback into story direction

The idea of having an actual in-game mechanic is to allow
players to influence the story in a direction that they would
more favor, without it just being the current "squeaky wheel"
mechanic (i.e. whoever has the time or the personality type to
stick around after the game to try to influence the GM).

Post by Mary K. Kuhner
I'd have been with your players, I think: bad feelings based
on competitiveness among group members have killed several campaigns
I've been in, and I'd want to avoid stirring them up if I could.
But you know your own group, and I don't.

Well, my player group is a less edgy and neurotic than many
I've seen. They're all over 25, none of them is a whiner or
chronically dissatisfied, they mostly do a nice job sharing the
spotlight. That doesn't mean that it's shared equally, because
not everyone has an equal desire to *be* in the spotlight. But
anyone who has showed any inclination to lead the story at all
has been allowed to have his/her moment, and in fact when one
of the back-benchers steps forward people even seem to make a
special effort to accomodate them.

I'm not saying that you aren't right about certain things, such
as "people who get all the RP awards might get an unfair leg up
in character development". Maybe one answer is to give a flat
number or Hero Points, which are only for re-roll purposes, to
solve the "hideously embarrassing flub" issue, and to keep
thinking of a mechanic to encourage players to participate more
fully and possibly a third mechanic to allow some kind of
regulated player feedback into story direction.

To tell you the truth, by far the easiest answer to all these
questions is to do nothing, and keep playing the same mostly
simulationist, partly dramatist games that I've been very
successfully running for the past 28 years. This is just me
looking to for ways to make progress on some of the things that
keep games from being as consistently satisfying as you might
hope for.

[gleichman]

Post by Del Rio
The reason for this is that I dislike the anger/humiliation
caused to players/characters who are under the tyranny of
totally chance-based story telling mechanics. I'm too
simulationist to drop dice altogether, but there are those
o stepped up to sing a ballad before the King...
o made a soul-bared plea for peace between the warring
tribes...
o roared his battle cry, and raced up the center of the enemy
line to take a mighty swing at their leader...
...and then rolled a 2.

The easiest solution to this is the old adage "Never call for a roll unless
you want a failure chance". Thus if a character is a Master Singer and steps
up before the King to present his Ballad- he is assumed to perform as
benefits a Master Singer.

D20 put this old time advice into it's formal mechanic of "Take 10", but
really I think it can and should be applied to any game.

[Rupert Boleyn]

Post by gleichman
The easiest solution to this is the old adage "Never call for a roll unless
you want a failure chance". Thus if a character is a Master Singer and steps
up before the King to present his Ballad- he is assumed to perform as
benefits a Master Singer.
D20 put this old time advice into it's formal mechanic of "Take 10", but
really I think it can and should be applied to any game.

What I like about the 'take 10' is that it, to a large extent, puts the
choice to risk failure or not into the hands of the player. It's not a
perfect mechanism, in that it tends to result in non-combat skills either
being good enough to not fail, or fail 50%+ of the time, but it's pretty
good overall.

[Del Rio]

Post by Mary K. Kuhner
My thinking about RPGs has really been influenced by a post-mortem
report I read, covering the RPGA tournament module "Webs of Deceit".
One point it raised was that the tournament format gave player-
voted awards, and one particular PC *never* got the award no
matter who was playing him. He was (a) a fighter, and (b) described
in his personality sketch as a silent, mysterious, introverted
guy. No one could play this character in a way that attracted
the favorable attention of the other players and GM. Rewarding
"roleplaying" just embittered players stuck with supporting roles
like this one.

One of the biggest problems with randomized character selection
is the possibility that a player will draw a character whose
stle is totally antithetical to, and unenjoyable for him to
play.

One of my friends once drew a character in a Call of Cthulhu
module whose background was that he was a manservant, the
"perfect butler" to another character. Wow, did that suck -
especially since the other chartacter was drawn by a
particularly passive player who never really stepped forward in
the game and simply had his "perfect butler" engage in really
boring, mundane tasks.

And as for the bitterness of the overlooked player with the
quiet character: I assert that you can roleplay even a quiet,
introverted character in a way that feeds back into the group
dynamic of the game, and which will allow other people to
appreciate and enjoy what you're doing, while even giving them
something to play off of.

You can, for example, describe what your character is doing
(even if it's just standing in the corner looking sullen),
making sure to emphasize your character's embarrassment/
discomfort/irritation, or whatever he/she is experiencing. Or
maybe your character is sufficiently removed from the group
that they wouldn't even know that much. In that case, play up
the fact that your character isn't participating in the group
dynamic, make emphasizing your character's non-particpation
into your contribution to the session as a player. Describe
your actions, whatever they are: "I pull up my hood over my
head and sit silently in the corner smoking my pipe. You all
see the occasional gleam of my eyes from under the hood, but my
facial expression is enigmatic. I sit there all night,
occasionally calling for a fresh tankard of ale, never speaking
to anyone but the Innkeeper."

Then there are the players who just don't say anything during a
session, except maybe in combat. They may be enjoying
themselves, which is good enough in its way - but it wouldn't
do for me to have more than maybe 2 of that kind of player in a
typical group of 5, or I as a GM would shortly start to crack
under the strain of carrying on a one-sided game (much in the
manner of trying to carry on a conversation with someone who
answers everything that's put to them with a "yes" or "no", and
doesn't give you any kind of leading thought that you can pick
up and carry on from).

What I was aiming at with some of the mechanics that I've been
kicking around is to encourage those less aggressive players to
step up and take the story off my hands occasionally. I have
in the past tried the simple expedient of throwing them the
ball, but I find that usually they throw it right back either
to me or to another player. So I was trying to conceive of a
reward mechanism that might encourage them to do so: one beyond
"hey, nice job", which in the past hasn't proved to be
sufficent incentive.

[Beowulf Bolt]

Post by Mary K. Kuhner

Post by Del Rio
I proposed that players would vote each other rolepaying
rewards. I.e. everyone, including players and GM would have
some number of points that they could distribute to any player
except themselves.

[...snippage]

Post by Mary K. Kuhner
The only time I'd see rewarding popularity as a good thing is if
the group has a habit of playing one way, but a strong desire to
play a different way, and just needs a boost to stick to it.
Otherwise, popularity is its own reward, and I think a mechanical
reward as well is going to be excessive.

I've had success in my most recent campaign by rewarding 'memorable'
actions rather than the roleplay itself. The campaign was subdivided
into five 'books' and at the end of each 'book', I would ask the players
for the three most memorable moments *not* involving their own character
(whether by PC or NPC), then assign bonus XP depending how the votes
fell out.

In the first book, these awards predominantly went to the flashiest
player, as has been my experience with other roleplay awards, but by the
end of the second and subsequent books, the players stopped necessarily
looking at the most obvious examples [*1] to think about the moments
that were memorable to them personally, and the awards flattened out,
even though the flashy player remains flashy and the stodgy player
remains stodgy.

[*1] - there was an exception in book 3 when one PC performed a
sequence of actions so mind-bogglingly ill-considered that the
ramifications coloured everything that took place thereafter, and
another PC reacted to these events in a very memorable way. These two
players split the majority of the bonus XP handed out for that book.


This isn't to say that this method was perfect. It only fit my
campaign because of the subdivision into well-defined 'books'. I had to
cap the possible bonus XP to be earned in such a manner to avoid it
being too unbalancing. And there was a tendency to vote for events from
the (more recent) climactic chapters and overlook actions taken in the
earlier chapters. But still, I was pleased by the results, and the
manner in which this engaged the players and drew debate.

Biff

[gleichman]

Post by Beowulf Bolt
But still, I was pleased by the results, and the
manner in which this engaged the players and drew debate.

Looking at this, I have two thoughts.

First: Either the rewards are split evenly among the players or they
are not.

If they aren't, you're rewarding some players who almost by defintion
have already been rewarded (by the cool action) in the first place. If
they are evenly split- than it's a wash in practical terms and may as
well be rolled into normal game advancement without the additional
overhead.


Second: Don't all groups talk about the highlights of a game aftewards?

[Beowulf Bolt]

Post by gleichman

Post by Beowulf Bolt
But still, I was pleased by the results, and the
manner in which this engaged the players and drew debate.

Looking at this, I have two thoughts.
First: Either the rewards are split evenly among the players or they
are not.
If they aren't, you're rewarding some players who almost by defintion
have already been rewarded (by the cool action) in the first place. If
they are evenly split- than it's a wash in practical terms and may as
well be rolled into normal game advancement without the additional
overhead.

First: It was never a perfectly even split, however. Even at its
'flattest'.

Second: 'Cool action' is not necessarily a substitute for a more
tangible reward. No matter how much your boss praises your work, that
bonus cheque provides a different sense of reward.

The tactic - from my POV - *worked*. It encouraged players to attempt
to do 'memorable' things rather than just stumble along and stick to the
safest, most obvious, or least complicated responses to a situation. I
wanted larger-than-life characters, and from most of the people
involved, I got them. How much of this is due to the XP bonuses is
arguable, but I get the impression that it at least *helped* to
encourage the style of play I was hoping for.

Post by gleichman
Second: Don't all groups talk about the highlights of a game
aftewards?

So? Does that make encouraging such in an organized fashion somehow
wrong, or tying it to a reward system?

All I was doing was suggesting an alternative to player-voted
'roleplaying' awards, not trying to win a Nobel prize for my Unique
Genius.

ObSheesh: Sheesh.

Biff

[gleichman]

Post by Beowulf Bolt
All I was doing was suggesting an alternative to player-voted
'roleplaying' awards, not trying to win a Nobel prize for my Unique
Genius.

That's good because it's basically the same mechanic and advice for extra
rewards I've seen in many rpgs- with exactly the same problems.

And don't feel special because I didn't like it. Ask around, I don't like
anything including my own solutions. Instead consider me a simple test. If
you're willing to pay (or willing not to notice) the faults I find with a
suggested system, go for it.

[Beowulf Bolt]

Post by gleichman
And don't feel special because I didn't like it. Ask around, I don't
like anything including my own solutions. Instead consider me a simple
test. If you're willing to pay (or willing not to notice) the faults I
find with a suggested system, go for it.

Your so-called 'faults' boiled down to "why award bonus experience at
all?" and "everyone rehashes campaigns". Not exactly the type of
probing analysis that I would look for in a critic, thanks.

Look - it's simple: I don't give a rats ass whether you liked the
proposal or not. Hell, it wouldn't even suit all my *own* campaigns.
All I was doing was proposing a subtle variant of a topic under
discussion. Take it or leave it.

Biff

[Beowulf Bolt]

[responding to myself]

Post by Beowulf Bolt
Look - it's simple: I don't give a rats ass whether you liked the
proposal or not.

On second thought, this response might be a little harsh in tone. It
is not my intent to contribute to dragging the tone of discussion back
down into the gutter and driving people off again.

My apologies to all.

Biff

[psychohist]

Post by Beowulf Bolt
[responding to myself]

Post by Beowulf Bolt
Look - it's simple: I don't give a rats ass whether you liked the
proposal or not.

On second thought, this response might be a little harsh in tone. It
is not my intent to contribute to dragging the tone of discussion back
down into the gutter and driving people off again.
My apologies to all.
Biff

Thanks.

Warren

[gleichman]

Post by Beowulf Bolt
Look - it's simple: I don't give a rats ass whether you liked the
proposal or not.

Too much ego with you. Second person for the killfile.

[Del Rio]

Post by gleichman

Post by Beowulf Bolt
Look - it's simple: I don't give a rats ass whether you liked the
proposal or not.

Too much ego with you. Second person for the killfile.

Aw c'mon, if we were gonna be killfiling people for ego,
discussion on the group would screech to a halt. ;-)

[gleichman]

Post by Del Rio

Post by gleichman
Too much ego with you. Second person for the killfile.

Aw c'mon, if we were gonna be killfiling people for ego,
discussion on the group would screech to a halt. ;-)

There's just simple ego, and then there's stylish ego. The latter gets
a pass :)

[R. G. 'Stumpy' Marsh]

Post by Beowulf Bolt
The tactic - from my POV - *worked*. It encouraged players to attempt
to do 'memorable' things rather than just stumble along and stick to the
safest, most obvious, or least complicated responses to a situation. I
wanted larger-than-life characters, and from most of the people
involved, I got them. How much of this is due to the XP bonuses is
arguable, but I get the impression that it at least *helped* to
encourage the style of play I was hoping for.

That's one of the reasons I like the "Attitude" concept from the very
rules-light Bad Attitudes action movie rules.

<http://www.unclebear.com/wiki/images/9/9e/Badtudesrev.pdf>

Characters live and die by their Attitude score in this system. Damage
reduces Attitude and the only way to recover it is to do something
that demonstrates attitude.

In real life and most RPGs, characters don't spontaneously heal like
that, but in action movies, rapid recovery out of sheer force of will
is genre convention. Like BB's XP awards, it rewards memorable lines
and daring escapades instead of "smart play" and, IME leads to more
entertaining games. (Which is, of course, a dramatist priority.)

[Neil Smith]

Post by Del Rio
I proposed that players would vote each other rolepaying
rewards. I.e. everyone, including players and GM would have
some number of points that they could distribute to any player
except themselves. All of these rewards would be in the form
of "Story Points". Story points could be used for the
following sorts of things. (Btw, my campaign is D&D/d20
based, but includes Hero/GURPS style Ads/Disads).

The game PrimeTime Adventures (aka PTA) has this, with its Fan Mail
mechanism. It's one of the core mechanics of the system, and it works
a treat. Players give each other Fan Mail for contributing something
cool in the game; one point can be awarded per player per scene.

Two things to note: first, 'cool' is deliberately un-defined in the
game. Second, the award is to the _player_, not the character, and
out-of-character contributions from all players are encouraged. It's
a much more group storytelling game than the traditional 'my-guy'
first-person RPG.

Neil.

[Mary K. Kuhner]

Post by Neil Smith
The game PrimeTime Adventures (aka PTA) has this, with its Fan Mail
mechanism. It's one of the core mechanics of the system, and it works
a treat. Players give each other Fan Mail for contributing something
cool in the game; one point can be awarded per player per scene.

What can Fan Mail be used to do?

Mary Kuhner ***@eskimo.com

[Neil Smith]

Post by Mary K. Kuhner

Post by Neil Smith
The game PrimeTime Adventures (aka PTA) has this, with its Fan Mail
mechanism. It's one of the core mechanics of the system, and it works
a treat. Players give each other Fan Mail for contributing something
cool in the game; one point can be awarded per player per scene.

What can Fan Mail be used to do?

Sorry, I should have said.

Resolution in PTA is done with a 'card pool' system. Player and GM
each draw a number of playing cards; whoever gets the most red cards
(or is it black? whatever) wins the conflict while the person with the
highest value card gets to narrate. Players typically get 2-4 cards
automatically and can buy additional ones for 1 FM each (before any
cards are revealed). Other players can also buy cards with Fan Mail
and allocate them to whichever side they think is the most interesting
(or both, if they just want to bid for narration rights over the
outcome).

The GM has a small pool of Budget points. He uses Budget to buy cards
for his side of conflicts. Used Budget goes into the Fan Mail pool;
players can draw from the Fan Mail pool to award Fan Mail to other
players. If a card bought with Fan Mail is a success, the GM gets an
extra point of Budget, otherwise the point is lost from the game.

We used poker chips for Fan Mail and Budget. It made things much
simpler to have the physical tokens moving around the table, Budget ->
FM pool -> player's FM -> Budget.

I may have some of the details wrong: it's been a while since I've
played PTA. But that's the general idea of PTA's economy.

Neil.

[gleichman]

Post by Mary K. Kuhner

Post by gleichman
The campaign had memorable characters and events. But the system fought
it and by the time I moved to replace it, the group's morale had been
damaged too much.

Can you say more about this--how it manifested, what people tried to
do about it? I'm thinking a lot about player morale and its
cultivation lately.

I've asked the players involved for a bit more feedback on this and I'll
post it if it adds or modifies what I saw and noted.

I had two players who attempted Hucksters and both had basically the same
reaction. They'd start complaining about the backlashes which was answered
by "But look at what you can do when you're lucky" (they can do really over
the top things) or "remember what you did to..." comments.

The non-huckster layers tend to remember the high points, points that they
could never reach. They alsooverlook the backlashes and failures as payment.
They of course don't have to deal with the consistent low level of
performance and so don't understand what a drain that is (I include myself
in this by the way).

Over time the player becomes detached from their character as it fails time
and time again. It's basically a failure to live up to expectation and
mental image.

As GM I began to notice this around the 5th adventure or so and start taking
little half-way steps to modify the system so that it became more consistent
without over-powering the rest of the group. These steps basically fail and
the player sinks further into the mindset of it being a lost cause.

I finally decide upon a complete overhaul, but by that time the player is
wanting to return to the game where they were able to accomplish something.

Looking back on it I should have:

1. Resisted my attraction to the poker hand mechanic and fully examined it
up front.
2. Avoided half-way adjustments. This is a lot of highsight, but it's worth
noting that you can't in mid-stream alter the world mechanics multiple times
without paying a price in player attachment.

[Mary K. Kuhner]

Post by gleichman
The non-huckster layers tend to remember the high points, points that they
could never reach. They also overlook the backlashes and failures as payment.
They of course don't have to deal with the consistent low level of
performance and so don't understand what a drain that is (I include myself
in this by the way).

A character who either succeeds gloriously or fails disasterously has
a very strong flavor that clashes with many, probably most, conceptions.
I think the only two common niches available are Captain Chaos (he doesn't
care if he lives or dies, or even if the other PCs live or die) and
Mr. Comic Relief. If those are not what you want to play, you have a
big problem.

Other players tend to resent Captain Chaos, and the person playing him
often resents Mr. Comic Relief; the other players may as well, if they
wanted someone more effective.

This reminds me a little of a GM back in Berkeley who wanted to distinguish
mages from priests by having mages have lots of spells they could use
frequently, and priests having a few *enormous* showstoppers and nothing
else. No one but him liked this idea. Who wants to play a character
that does nothing in 90% of engagements? Conversely, who wants to play
a character whose greatest successes can be utterly trumped by someone
else? It has *both* those drawbacks, for different players, and they
both disliked it. But at least in his scheme, the priest could choose
when to use his big success; it wasn't random.

Post by gleichman
Over time the player becomes detached from their character as it fails time
and time again. It's basically a failure to live up to expectation and
mental image.

Yeah.

We encountered this with a couple of White Wolf's systems, which initially
look like they're about highly competent people, but in our hands were
not. I particularly remember the discovery that botch chance for hard
tasks went *up* with skill, not down: you were better off rolling one
die and hoping for a success than rolling ten and risking a massive
botch.

We didn't learn that from rules analysis, alas; we did the analysis after
the fact when the players (both Jon and me in separate games) gave up
due to utter lack of PC sense-of-competence.

It could more or less be made to work for beginners with tremendous
talent, but there was nowhere to go from there, since adding more
skill made them seem *more* beginnerish--like transitioning from
somewhat incompetent normals, to notably incompetent heroes, to
ludicrously incompetent superheroes.

[things you wish you'd done]

Post by gleichman
2. Avoided half-way adjustments. This is a lot of highsight, but it's worth
noting that you can't in mid-stream alter the world mechanics multiple times
without paying a price in player attachment.

Yes. And if you *ever* change to a mechanic that makes things worse,
you can lose player trust with astonishing speed.

In Shadowrun we called this "Autofire of the Week Club" after one GM
who never could find an autofire rule that worked for him. Players tended,
fairly quickly, never to attempt autofire or carry autofire weapons
anymore. The single-shot-kill sniper rifle became the weapon
of choice for everyone; not because autofire wasn't effective (some
weeks it was all too effective) but because no one wanted to lean on an
obviously broken part of the system. The situation rapidly reached
the point where he would announce his new rules and we wouldn't even
vet them: we'd just say "Yeah, whatever." This was bad for *his* morale.

Broken rules that appear by surprise are really hard on morale. You
want to treat the game rules as invisible so you can enjoy the
actual action, but then wham! they let you down.

Mary Kuhner ***@eskimo.com

[Erol K. Bayburt]

On Fri, 17 Nov 2006 01:03:24 +0000 (UTC),

Post by Mary K. Kuhner
This reminds me a little of a GM back in Berkeley who wanted to distinguish
mages from priests by having mages have lots of spells they could use
frequently, and priests having a few *enormous* showstoppers and nothing
else. No one but him liked this idea. Who wants to play a character
that does nothing in 90% of engagements? Conversely, who wants to play
a character whose greatest successes can be utterly trumped by someone
else? It has *both* those drawbacks, for different players, and they
both disliked it. But at least in his scheme, the priest could choose
when to use his big success; it wasn't random.

Would something like that work in one of your multi-character
one-on-one games, or would the priest fade into the background?

Otherwise, yes, I agree. I've seen a similar problem, sometimes, with
just ordinary D&D wizards, especially at low levels: The have a few
potential battlesenders, but must of the time they just need to hide
and avoid getting killed.

[Mary K. Kuhner]

Post by Erol K. Bayburt
On Fri, 17 Nov 2006 01:03:24 +0000 (UTC),

Post by Mary K. Kuhner
This reminds me a little of a GM back in Berkeley who wanted to distinguish
mages from priests by having mages have lots of spells they could use
frequently, and priests having a few *enormous* showstoppers and nothing
else.

Would something like that work in one of your multi-character
one-on-one games, or would the priest fade into the background?

I don't think it would work; as you say, characters who aren't doing
anything fade into the background. Doing something one fight in ten
is not enough. (Or maybe one could get some characterization out of
having all the other PCs constantly trying to manipulate his choices.
Hm. I don't think I like that either.)

I think it would also drive me, as a player, stark raving mad trying
to figure out when to use the big boom. I don't like having the
outcome hinge on a single PC's single decision like this.

My SCAP wizard was as far in that direction as I'd ever care to
go, maybe a bit further--he really did stop an inordinate amount
of fights, often with Tasha's Irresistable Laughter, which for
some reason was irresistable in his hands. (The use on the
umber hulk was particularly...odd.) But he also got to
zap away with his 1d4+1 wand, which was not irrelevant, but also
not a showstopper by any means.

Mary Kuhner ***@eskimo.com

[Simon Smith]

Post by gleichman
...but not really a tale of campaign failure, not yet anyway. I thought
I'd toss it out for discussion.

<snip>

Post by gleichman
It took about a half dozen games, but the huckster players started
complaining. Serious complaining. I hadn't been watching them too
closely but I did agree that they seemed to be feast or famine- either
being worthless or powerful beyond belief.
I finally agreed to look in the poker mechanic in detail. Some
searching turned up the hand probabilities. Cross-referencing with the
dice probabilities revealed the nature of the system plainly.
Feast and famine it was, with more the later than the former. Poker
hands have huge breaks in odds as one goes up the ranking, and the game
system took advantage of this by the escalating the power of those
hands. To balance this, the chance of backlash is high and the effect
of common hands low. In concept perhaps ok.
In practice, it sucked.
Great success would happen on the least important times, great failures
in the most important times. Rare would be a good pairing of event and
spell result. Consistency was nowhere to be found- and it's
consistency that we most associate with excellence. Instead of a hero
armed with rare mystical knowledge, the Huckster character felt like a
blind clown armed with dynamite.

That card mechanic does sound so cool one would want to try to rescue it.
And in principle, what is the difference between a poker hand generating a
low-probability specatacular success and the dice doing it?

Without experience of the system, I'm presuming that the spell effects went
something like - Ace high, minimum success, a pair, slightly better, three
of a kind, better still, up to straight flushes and royal straight flushes,
kaboom.

I also presume hucksters have some sort of skill rank as well.

The two fixes I'd look at would be 1) having a sliding scale for the minimum
spell success, and as your skill increases you stat to get guaranteed
successes even when the cards aren't co-operating. That means a skilled
huckster gets flashes of dynamite at the same rate as before, but that as
his skill improves his worst possible results get consistently better and 2)
this is Wild West Cards; they should be able to cheat. A starting huckster
gets no cards up his sleeve. An experienced one gets one, two, three,
however many seems to fit the game. Take them from another deck, and allow
the huckster to play them when needed to turn poor hands into good hands
/when it actually matters/ in-game. Maybe they have to make another skill
roll to be able to tilt the odds like this (cheating the gods of chance and
magic isn't something done easily - or lightly), to ensure that they don't
/always/ get royal straight flushes at the key point, but if a skilled
huckster can be counted on to bump even a poor hand to at least a middling
good hand when it matters, then they'd probably be a lot more fun to play.

[gleichman]

Post by Simon Smith
That card mechanic does sound so cool one would want to try to rescue it.
And in principle, what is the difference between a poker hand generating a
low-probability specatacular success and the dice doing it?

For one, you have much finer control with dice than you do poker hands.

I attempted all the steps you listed and more, and if anything they made
things worse. Allowing consistency at the low end meant there was no
drawback for the high end, allowing extra cards brought truly over-whelming
effects into too common of occurance.

At this point I suppose *I've* lost morale, and am returning to a system
that will work (although I do have a doubt or two about a another core
Deadlands concept that's part of it).

I note that the new Savage Worlds version of Deadlands (called Deadlands
reloaded) they too gave up on balancing the poker hands. Now they give you
basically spell points and you only draw a hand when you wish to exceed
them.